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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| azn exce - um, what?So the Asian Excellence Awards are up again next week. What a... um... spectacle. Wow. Why do I cringe when I see and read about it every year? I volunteered for the organization when it hosted the event in 2000 at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall. At the time I thought it was a nice thing to do for the so-called Asian American community - it was a fledgling organization that barely had enough manpower to hold all the things together - Remy Martin was a sponsor, and a now-defunct Asian American magazine was responsible for most of the legwork and labor of bringing everything to the site. I remember getting a chance to meet composer Tan Dun, who was being honored for his work on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's score, and film director Shehkar Kapur, who was also being honored. Then year after year the organizers kept making it bigger and bigger, moving it to Carnegie Hall and then eventually out to the West Coast at UCLA's Royce Hall, getting television networks involved and basically trying to make the event look as glamorous and big time as possible.
Is that what Asian Excellence is? Being seen in the press as much as possible and making yourself look like you're successful in Hollywood fashion? Ironically, the TV network that promotes Asian American Programming and promoted the Awards show heavily last year now carries this tag on it's website:
Sometimes I think every year that the AZN (oops, can't call it that anymore, the network shut down) Asian Excellence Awards are one day going to run out of so-called celebrities to honor because they used them all up. How many times can we recognize people like Lucy Liu and B.D. Wong and Daniel Dae Kim and Yul Kwon and the other handful of Asian faces on prime time network TV? Can we really consider getting any sort of media exposure the main criteria for being excellent? What sort of message is it sending to basically parody the Academy Awards (poorly) but fill it up with people whose main qualification for the award is they're Asian or partly Asian?
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| cd release concert!
saturday april 26
7:30pm
church of the advent hope
111 e 87th st @ lexington ave
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| day 46does it count as a sacrifice if you don't really view it as such?
today marks the end of the lent season, which for many people means they no longer have to avoid eating a certain category of food, or a certain form of activity, such as watching tv, playing video games, or browsing certain internet sites. in my case, for the last 46 days i haven't had any red meat, colas, or fast food.
i thought that giving up those three things would be difficult, since i consumed all three with a high degree of frequency - steaks, hamburgers, cokes, mcdonald's, french fries - i would have at least one of those things at least once or twice every few days. instead, i found that something odd happened - it was actually very easy to give those things up. in fact, i looked forward to the opportunity to turn down those things whenever i could. after all, how many chances do you get to be reminded about your faith when you're trying to figure out what to eat for lunch?
when it comes to an everyday activity like eating, most of us aren't governed by any sort of driving conviction to do act a very specific way. those who are usually are doing so either because of personal convictions for a cause (being vegan, having religious restrictions) or for actual health reasons (going on a diet, trying to gain more muscle mass). for the rest of us, the greatest difficulty comes in choosing from the dozens of food options we have at our disposal on a regular basis. it gets to the point where giving up a single meal like lunch or dinner is considered fasting.
giving up red meat proved to be remarkably easy. i merely chose to eat chicken, pork, or seafood. likewise, giving up cola just meant i drank ginger ale or sprite or some other soda. and i just decided not to go into the mcdonald's a block away from my school. for the first time in a long time, i had some sort of simple conviction when it came to an everyday habit. and pretty soon, that too became a habit. and then i started to feel increasingly as though i wasn't really sacrificing something at all - i was just adding some sort of conviction to an otherwise ordinary daily act of living.
faith, it seems, is more about the ordinary and mundane than it is about the spectacular and profound. perhaps that's really what lent is about. giving up desserts and tv sports might seem ludicrous on one hand when compared with the persecution faced by christians in religiously oppressive countries, but if lent is about sacrificing something in order to remember something else, perhaps it is also about adding simple conviction to the everyday things of life that you normally go about without really thinking about them.
****
still, i think i'm going to have a steak this week.
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| day 35
after the exhibition match between roger federer and pete sampras had finished, i spent some time thinking about the most memorable thing i'd ever seen when it comes to tennis, and i immediately thought of one moment - andre agassi's final match of his career in the 3rd round of the u.s. open. it wasn't the match anybody remembers (he lost), it was the stirring 3-minute standing ovation that the entire stadium gave him after the match ended that brought him, myself, and probably hundreds of thousands of others watching to tears, acknowledging the greatness and incredible longevity of his complete career as a tennis player. even seeing the video of it on youtube still brings a lump to my throat. it truly seemed as though he was the recipient of universal adulation.
****
this morning, as i walked to the subway, i did a literal triple take as i passed the covers of the daily newspapers, all carrying this photograph or some variant of it:
every newspaper's headline screamed the same thing about governor eliot spitzer and his involvement in a high priced prostitution ring. what stunned me was the scale on which this was being covered - the lead story not only on local news but on practically every major national news publication both paper and online showed a photo of spitzer and ran a headline that indicted him of being caught in a sex scandal. the local press was especially brutal. it truly seemed as though he was the recipient of universal condemnation.
****
it doesn't seem like there's much in common between andre agassi and eliot spitzer. but somehow, all day long i thought there was a strange similarity between seeing a crowd bestowing its praise and love on a retiring tennis star and a vast global media horde bestowing its wrath and damnation on a scandalized politician. perhaps it was the idea that you could very easily find the reverse - the public vilification of an athlete like michael vick, the media endorsement of a politician like barack obama - and how easily we go from one extreme to another when it comes to public support and condemnation for what we approve and disapprove of in others. or perhaps it was also the sobering reminder of the power of public opinion to both lovingly build up as well as utterly destroy a man.
****
9 The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,
"Hosanna to the Son of David!"
"Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!"
"Hosanna in the highest!"
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| day 26is there ever a way, really, measure the success level or "effectiveness" level of a church? i've always wondered whether or not there was some way or some sort of concrete figure or number by which you could accurately gauge the spiritual condition or level of a church body. judging by today's general standards, i suppose you would look at concrete statistics - things like average attendance level per service, amount of money generated via congregational support, and... well, what else is there? what else can you actually measure in easily comprehensible terms like numbers? and really, what's the point in measuring those sorts of statistics anyways?
maybe "success" is the wrong word for what i'm thinking about. maybe "progress" is a better one - how is progress measured in a church? can it ever be? i suppose i'm just projecting my own feelings about my own spiritual journey on to a larger body - periodically i stop and wonder, have i progressed at all since a year ago in my faith? two years ago? five years ago? how would i know? how could i tell? wouldn't it be terribly discouraging to discover one day that you've been going to church for years and years and you still find that you feel like you're in the same place spiritually that you were before you started going that church? or is that an irrational fear? or is it really impossible to be in the same place? and if i were shopping around for a church to attend... wouldn't i want to go to the one that seemed to have the most dynamic environment? wouldn't i want to find the one with the highest level of measurable "success" and "progress" among its attendees so that i could incorporate those things into my own spiritual life as well?
or am i looking for the wrong thing?
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